If You Only Knew: Losing My Dad to Multiple System Atrophy: A Tale of Grief and Gratitude
Written as both testimony and reflection, this book preserves the reality of my family’s experience while offering comfort, recognition, and hard-won insight to anyone facing life-altering illness.
If You Only Knew is a raw and deeply personal account of what happens when a terminal illness tears through a family’s life and leaves no part of it untouched. When Kevin’s father was diagnosed with Multiple System Atrophy, he was thrust into a world of caregiving, advocacy, medical systems, constant crisis, and relentless decline. What follows is not only the story of his father’s illness and death, but of the lasting trauma, exhaustion, and reckoning that come after.
This is not a polished story about courage in the usual sense, and it does not pretend that love makes suffering noble. Instead, it is an honest, unflinching look at what it costs to stay, what it means to keep going when everything in your life is being reshaped by illness, and the truths few people are willing to say out loud about caregiving, survival, and the health care system. At the same time, it is a story about devotion, resilience, and the moments of love and kindness that still manage to matter in the middle of devastation.
Written as both testimony and reflection, this book preserves the reality of one family’s experience while offering comfort, recognition, and hard-won insight to anyone facing the life-altering illness of someone they love.
Please note that this book is self-edited and self-published, so please excuse any parts of the book that might not look quite right. The contents of this book are what matter.